Radioland

Chapter 2

KRIS

Running fixed me, it was my go-to. Running kept my mind sharp. If I couldn’t run, I was f****d. It broke up the pool of garbage coalescing at the back of my head and kept it from inserting its flotsam into my thoughts. Running allowed me to shift focus, dodging suits and tourists along Front Street, past the convention centre and its curbside fry trucks, the CBC mothership and the levelled debris of the Globe and Mail building on the other side of Spadina. Running helped me shift focus so that life wasn’t just a song on the radio: verse-chorus-verse-chorus. A cab was going to pick me up in two hours, and every two blocks I hacked like a chain-smoker, spitting out bits of phlegm when no one was looking. I could do this. Distance running was awesome: you could do it hungover, stoned, with an empty stomach or, like right now, all of the above. Distance running is awesome because your only opponent is you.

Running. Two hours before a cab was supposed to pick me up, I was running, my first since coming down with a chest cold a few weeks before, worse than anything I’d had as a kid. And today my nerves, not wanting to eat. Feed a fever, starve a cold – was that the right order? Tightness in my chest like it was bound with elastic.

A cab was coming for me.

I needed to keep my head straight for tonight. Focus. Nerves crawling with ants. My legs were struggling as I fought to look forward to the dopamine rush ahead. All the role-playing you have to do when you’re running and not particularly good at it: the coaching, the bargaining and pleading, the faith that you’re going to feel better at some point in the future. Fighting not to think about …

Notices stapled to hydro posts. Ads for underground cinema, punk shows, the ever-present “success workshop.” Distractions that made it easier to take my mind off my lungs. This weird ad I kept seeing repeated throughout my route, offering a service to “cleanse” houses of their “negative energy” or something, “call Geoff.” Shook off the sweat, slicked the hair out of my eyes and looked for familiar landmarks from previous runs, precedents to prove that I could actually pull this s**t off – running, the big-a*s ceremony tonight, the f*****g email I got this morning. Keep pushing, keep pushing.

I remember his teeth, how they were stained by nicotine, how their tarnished ivory was revealed through each parting of his bearded lips.

I could do this. I’d done it before; my legs were up for it. Better now. Push. Relax. Keep moving. As I came out of the underpass my pace was good as I pushed uphill past Liberty Village and Lamport Stadium. I rounded Dufferin, due north, upping my pace, hoping I’d have some reserves left for a sprint at the end. Keep running, strip off that rust. Lungs were staying with me. I pulled up at the stoplight at Queen, bouncing on the balls of my feet to keep my legs limber, keep the rhythm, starting to feel complete, glaring across at the short distance between where I stood and the street I lived on, the gaping shotgun barrels of the CN Rail underpass, the crescendo of a UPX train crossing above. Flickering shadows and stale raindrops falling from the green girders onto the pavement below. There was an advance crossing signal and after a beat I pushed myself off the curb. I’d be in the shower in a minute focusing on –

The object hurtled toward me on my left, a cyclist rocketing downhill who had gambled on his speed to beat the oncoming crosswise traffic. I don’t know who got the most of it. Within a second or two of his angry shriek, his veering last minute, I turned inward to absorb the blow with my side, and got struck hard. Our torsos collided, somehow the handlebar ram horns didn’t hit my chest, somehow I had the time to see the audience of streetcar passengers gawking at us like balcony ticket holders at the Winter Garden Theatre. Bike frame wobbling, breathless, he continued eastbound, pedalling, building speed from shock. I was buckled over, holding my ribs.

“You should’ve looked where you were going!” he shouted from the fluted shadows of the underpass. He wasn’t looking back.

Every part of me wanted to snarl and howl like a battered animal, strike out. Instead I shuffled shell-shocked across the intersection with a couple of seconds remaining on the crossing signal, gripping my side like a cracked urn that might spill – red mist, red eyes, red ants crawling on me – staggering spiked with adrenaline, like a toy sputtering on the stupid momentum of a rubber band. There had been an explosion. Someone on the sidewalk stared at me when I stepped onto the curb, staring at me as if I should be lying on the road, dead. I actually turned around, doubled over and glanced, wondering if I was there, remembering the day not long after my father had left us and my mother had taken to convincing me there were no such things as gods.

Verse-chorus-verse-chorus.

Glancing repeatedly at my guitar and pedalboard in their respective hard cases sitting by the door as if someone else had packed them, their presence reiterating that tonight was still happening, and I was as ready as I was ever going to be. The hole I’d kicked in the wall just within my periphery. Searching for anything to distract myself from the radiating heat of my rib cage. Had a coughing fit that caused waves of soreness in my side.

Patterns. Patterns of patterns.

The drip-drip of the leaky bathroom faucet begging my attention. Wanted to rip it out of the vanity. Anger like boiling diesel, fists, gritted teeth.

Clop-clop-clop came the shoe heels upstairs. Verse-chorus-verse-chorus.

Needed to get out of here. Everything was a pattern jamming my head, which is why I ended up kicking the hole in the wall. I was ready to kick another.

You should’ve looked where you were going!

Clop-clop-clop. Clock. Check the clock. The cab would be here soon. Check my phone for texts. Looking for distra–

The email subject header from this morning:

Re: Charges filed against Charles Ibbitson

Turned on the TV and cranked the volume stupidly high – f**k the upstairs neighbours – and watched a band opening for some American sports megalith, and … I … didn’t … get it. I’d heard of them but I’d never actually seen them before. They were all basically twenty-three and immaculately clothed and shorn, these four visibly unique personas on stage: the pink-haired lead guitarist in the leather b*a doing high kicks, the bassist with the dumb-a*s smile who wore a Stars and Stripes muumuu, the drummer – trapped, like most drummers – effortlessly singing backing vocals despite doing sixteenth notes on the hi-hat. The lead vocalist dancing and strutting. Oh, and he sang. And at the end of their number he did a headstand on the stage. Effortlessly, all of them, like they were bred and trained on a secret army base in Guam.

Fun times, fun times. If you didn’t enjoy this s**t you had emotional issues.

I stared at these kids with amazement. I wondered if they’d ever climbed onstage while fighting diarrhea, had their gear damaged, looked out from the stage at a half-empty room of strangers in a strange city right after reading a smirky takedown of their album in the local indie or stared at one another backstage after learning that you were getting paid half of what was initially offered for the gig and unable to pull out without looking like assholes. Wondering whether this was worth sacrificing a more stable life for, whatever that was supposed to be.

Tonight was it. There might as well not be another day after this. The cab was coming. The email. My ribs. My lungs.

There was a case of beer waiting for me at the bottom of the stairwell when I got home, sent by none other than Red, one of the great damaged rock gods walking amongst us, with a note in his jarring polygraph script congratulating us, wishing us luck. I hoped he would reach out if he was staying in town. Someone who knew the real me. Please.

I jumped when my phone buzzed. Everything tense. Patterns. Before I could mute it I saw a bunch of texts with multiple exclamation marks. Attention. Attention.

A cab was coming for me and I was exhausted and it was barely past noon. I’d had the enterprising idea of booking a bunch of gigs in the lead-up to the ceremony tonight. And somehow they all went well enough, well enough were it not for there being no time to take care of anything in the real world while it was happening: work, money, my girl Heera wondering where I was at inside my head when I wasn’t making eye contact with her. And me, suspecting I’m inching further inward, yet becoming more see-through. Less adorable ha-ha. What exactly was I thinking?

Gotta move. If I could just keep moving then I could distract myself. Scrolling through congratulatory notes on my phone. There’s a cab coming for me. Meanwhile I was standing in the middle of my basement apartment like an actor dressed how people were expecting me to look, a more subdued riff on the cartoonish bullshit I’d had burned into my retinas, making me wonder who in fact the fake was. A polyester shirt with dots I got in Kensington Market for five bucks. The collar was long and pointed like it was from the ’70s (it was probably from the ’70s). A pair of whatever black jeans with honest holes in the knees that came from working barback and helping friends with renos for under-the-table money. I’d spent fifteen minutes wondering whether or not to put product in my hair or wait until later, closer to showtime. My socks had holes in them because they were the only pair left – no time for laundry. What do you even wear for being on TV?

Visible in patterns. Hiding in patterns. Prowling in patterns. Verse-chorus-verse-chorus.

You should’ve looked where you were going!

Reality was settling in. The pain in my side was glowing, my plants were nearly dead. I was basically living in a made-for-TV movie about a bachelor who gets his act together, except I wasn’t sure if I was the protagonist or his deadbeat friend.

My phone buzzed: the driver was here. My heart beating in my neck, I grabbed my gear, moved them into the narrow stairwell and locked the door behind me, feeling somehow as if I wasn’t supposed to return, or more weirdly that I would come back different: winner, famous, star, invisible, victim, loser. Monster. I ran up the steps two at a time until the radiating ache in my ribs made me slow down. I waved at the driver that I was here, then went back down and began the too-familiar process of gear hauling. At ground level I kept from looking into the first-floor window for fear of spotting my housemates, a stressed-out software developer couple in their twenties (she was seeing someone else).

“Kris?” the driver asked. The trunk was already popped, and he was standing outside the cab as I got to the sidewalk; I only needed to glance at his expression to know he was going to insist I put everything in the trunk.

I texted Waz as we pulled away from the curb to make sure he was on his way. Kendra would kick our asses if we were late. Drummers. In these moments she existed more like a football coach. She had more gear to haul so there was also the implicit guilt that we had to respect the burden of her instrument of choice.

Waz just got picked up.

WAZ

How you feeling?

I stared at the text, wondering if there was any way to make it look like I hadn’t read it. Other texts kept popping up – family and friends and blah blah excited for us. Awesome. Attention. Awesome.

If this was the apex of our careers it was incredibly not-fun. Get picked up, load in early, kill several hours and then “enjoy” the jittery party of peers and A&R stooges until two key points: when we play for them and a remote audience of thousands connecting via their laptops; and at the finale where the winner of the Polaris Prize was announced.

Dundas was too busy. I didn’t know why he took Dundas. The Carlu was at College Park. If he didn’t turn at Bathurst, I’d make a fuss since I didn’t want to get stuck idling in Chinatown – the bottleneck at Huron was the worst and I didn’t want to get crammed in with the other drivers.

“Could you –”

I stopped myself. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror, and I couldn’t tell if he was honestly curious or daring me to complete my sentence. It dawned on me that, as a VIP, I wasn’t paying for any of this. Let go, Kris. Too many layers of privilege for this white kid.

“It’s okay,” I smiled falsely. I looked at my watch, already knowing what time it was because I was checking it every minute. Knowing I was going to be gawked at later. Knowing I wasn’t interested in talking with anyone. Knowing Heera, my beautiful woman, was going to be in the audience.

“Would you like the radio, sir?”

“Oh, no. No, thank you.”

Not unless he could find a station that reverberated and nullified all the –

I felt like a joke, sitting in a taxi I could barely afford, trying to “let things go” like any of that mindfulness s**t was going to stick. I don’t suppose you did any market research before you decided to become a musician? a heckling voice called out from the back of my head, my uncle Karl when I was in my early twenties. Calculating the lost bar shifts while playing shows the last couple of weeks, unable, in parallel, to wrap my head around the fact that we’d been shortlisted for a Prize/prize/“prize” that came with a good chunk of money and exposure. Potentially our greatest accomplishment to date. So why did it feel icky, like one of those closed-door corporate events where we held our noses and did it for lucre? Another obligation to grind through, like shovelling the front walk of the house in winter for a discount on rent.

Two nights ago I had a panic attack I didn’t tell anyone about before the gig we played. All it took was somebody slamming a door nearby backstage, a big-a*s steel door, slamming it like they hoped it would meld with the f*****g jamb. Guy from one of the opening bands, whatever. Jolted, clapped my ears with my hands, shivering. I began to cave in. I wanted to be home, in bed, alone with the cat. Patterns. Verse-chorus-verse-chorus. Somewhere in the last year it felt like I’d lost two layers of skin – that any sudden touch or sound wasn’t just irritable but would actually harm me. Waz came in because he couldn’t find a pick for his bass and saw me hunched over like I was bracing for an explosion. I made something up, like I do. Like I did with Heera. Better to be seen as eccentric than damaged. As a musician I don’t know which gave me peak advantage. I drank hard that night, hoping no one was listening to my elocution when I sang. Kendra didn’t give me any side-eye afterward, so I must have slid it past her too.

It wasn’t getting any better. Anticipating a hand would place the pads of its fingers on the back of my neck.

The driver took a right off College and pulled over to the curb. Yonge Street sidewalks, people filing past with shopping bags advertising where they’d spent their money this afternoon. People filling the Tim Hortons like it was a subway entrance. I was so warm in the cab and insulated in my thoughts that when I heard him pop the trunk a part of me wanted to pretend I didn’t have to leave. For a moment the email I’d got about the child predator didn’t really matter.

When she was fifteen, Kendra Doucette went to a Ramones tribute act at an all-ages club in Scarborough with her girlfriend. It was her first concert without her parents as escorts and she was trying to impress her date. Grinning, jamming in a mosh pit with a bunch of crazies going apeshit to “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Some guy threw a beer bottle that split open when it hit her jaw, dislocating it in the process. She said she didn’t clue in until seconds after, thinking it had been someone’s elbow in the pit. Driving down, digging on the dance floor, gushing blood. I kept thinking of the broken glass, the kind some mf’er throws against an alley wall, the shards. She left in an ambulance; her girlfriend never went out with her again. Whenever I had a moment to look at her face, its strong features, I could recognize the silvery lines where the bottle had cut through her chin and around her cheek, reminded of the story she’d told us about plastic surgery, losing teeth. It wasn’t our business to know, but we were stuck on a marathon drive between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg at the time. Things come out on the road. It’s not so much that they stayed there so much as there’s a tacit agreement that we’re hearing it in confidence. Between the three of us I was the only one who hadn’t really spilled his guts. Well, I did. I wrote the lyrics.

We stood on the very stage we’d be performing on in six hours, house lights were up, everything flatly visible and uncharming. The Carlu was weird. Glenn Gould performed here, we were told on no fewer than two occasions. The strap over my shoulder, the weight of my Nighthawk, light as it was, my ribs felt like they would cave in, hoping I wasn’t coughing too much.

“The hell do we do now?” Kendra asked. The auditorium was big and black, and wooden and old. Preserved. Turned out she didn’t have to bring her kit, except for her snare and sticks, lucky bastard. We only got a short sound check – we’re a noisy act so it didn’t really matter to us, other than to know which direction the cameras might be. She wore her favourite shirt, which was silk and blue, dotted with tiny plastic googly eyes. We matched.

Attention. Texts, DMs, notifications: everyone on my phone telling me this was the biggest goddamned night of my life. Like there was nothing beyond this. Heera, who had almost as many followers as I did, posted a picture of me I didn’t know she’d taken. Me offstage, about to walk on – our Hamilton show, I think – dressed like I belonged there but the look on my face … just f*****g lost. Her caption: THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR BOY!! If she only knew I’d waited stupidly long to tell her there was a ticket waiting for her for tonight, knowing in the back of my head the less notice she had the harder it made for her to come. I can’t explain.

Attention, pings, vibrations.

Email.

Charges filed against Charles Ibbitson

We weren’t Arcade Fire. We didn’t make music that a wide swath of demographics can get off on. Kendra, Waz and I always knew we appealed to a smaller crowd, tighter. I made music so that someone, if only a “someone” of five hundred people, was able to tune in. Extend. That transitory moment where horizon blends land and sky; we’re harmonizing: me and the band, the band with each other, a tuning fork, the audience with us. Nothing better than those gigs, those timeline highlights. Integration. And there’s nothing better than overhearing someone talk about our stuff afterward like someone describing a near-death experience or a favourite film. In that moment, the world falling apart doesn’t matter. Scraping together rent with nothing left over doesn’t matter. Not knowing what I’m going to be doing when I’m forty doesn’t really matter.

You should’ve looked where you were going!